“WHO CONSCIOUSLY THROWS HIMSELF INTO THE WATER OR ONTO THE KNIFE?” In Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (1869), Prince Myshkin, the idiot of the title, poses this question to Rogozhin, who is in love with Nastasya. The young woman seems to be in love with both the Prince and Rogozhin, though in The Idiot it’s a bit hard to tell who is in love with who, because everyone is falling in love with each other all the time, and no one will ever admit that she or he is in love, except by way of making fun of the idea of being
Benny and Josh Safdie, Uncut Gems, 2019. Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler). A24 We were called hip-pocketers, because we lived from one deal to the next: Your business could fit in the wallet in your pocket. You bought a used Rolex at a pawnshop for a thousand bucks from the kid who’s just paid five hundred […]
Lately I’ve been feeling differently about birthdays. For a long time I looked forward to them, as we do when we are children. Then I went through a long stage when I dreaded my birthdays because they were little—no, big—reminders of what I’d wanted to do but hadn’t yet done, or had missed the chance to do altogether. Then I entered the birthdays of my late forties and early fifties (I’ll be fifty-three in May), when I actually started to feel, well, old. Death approaching, all that.
When I was in a suicidal phase in my life and hiding my alcoholism from my partner, I was also working on a book about love and deception. My editor at the time, with whom I had no doubt too intimate a friendship—he once sternly but correctly told me, “Clancy, I can’t be both your editor and your psychiatrist”—recommended two books to me: William Styron’s Darkness Visible, one of the best-known studies of alcoholism and the depression that often follows on the heels of new sobriety, and Al Alvarez’s The Savage God, the classic work on suicide among and as
In philosopher Simon Critchley’s Borges-ian novella Memory Theater, the narrator, who happens to be named Simon Critchley, discovers the papers of one Michel Haar, “a close friend and former philosophy teacher” who has recently died in a sanatorium after taking early retirement from the Sorbonne. Michel, like one of his heroes, Martin Heidegger, had the long-pedigreed and quasi-mystical idea that poetry can emancipate us from the flat-footed language of philosophy and bring us closer to the truth. This scenario allows Critchley to embark on a tour of philosophical thought and at the same time to tell a fascinating story of
Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrators exhibit a curious combination of extreme moral nihilism and a desperate need for violent, unforgettable experiences. Eileen, her new and best novel, is a love story told by a young woman who doesn’t understand love and who is leaving behind the only man she really loves, her father. Eileen hates her father, too. He is an abusive alcoholic, who bullies and even assaults his teenage daughter: “In my last years with him my father would occasionally wrap his flat hands around my pencil-thin throat and threaten that he could squeeze the life out of me any time
What is perhaps most curious about our belief that it is wrong to lie is that it requires us, both individually and as a culture, to engage in a particularly egregious kind of cognitive dissonance. It’s easy for me to insist that it is wrong to kill human beings because I have never killed another human being (at least not directly, though I am a citizen of a nation that kills innocents). I can teach my children that it is wrong to steal with a mostly clean conscience, because it’s been a long time since my preteen shoplifting days. But
The National Stadium in Santiago. When I was in Chile in the summer of 2001 I stupidly asked a taxi driver, in my bad Spanish, if Pinochet were dead. “No,” he said, and by the way he looked over his shoulder I could see the question made him nervous. “No, he is still alive.” He […]
Remember the story of Dumbo the elephant? It comes to us by way of two of America’s greatest storytellers, P. T. Barnum—whose “Jumbo the Elephant” was the star of “The Greatest Show on Earth”—and Walt Disney, who made “Jumbo Jr.” (Dumbo’s original name) world-famous in his retelling of Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl’s classic children’s book. After Dumbo gets drunk and passes out, he awakens to find himself dangerously high above the ground, frightened and stuck in the branches of a tree. Timothy Q. Mouse, the circus impresario who is Dumbo’s only friend, convinces him that all he needs to
